Reliable, useful monopropellant liquid gas generators for use in missiles are a necessity and much work has been done on the catalytic decomposition of hydrazine and similar fuels for this purpose. Liquid gas generators have used inert beds with a catalyst such as shell 405 catalyst and inert beds with various oxidizing agents such as I.sub.2 O.sub.5, HIO.sub.3, and KM.sub.n O.sub.4. In this type of gas generation, the catalytic beds are very expensive, and the inert beds with oxidizing agents can only be started a limited number of times. Some of these systems are also very expensive due to the chemical used therein.
Inert porous support materials such as firebrick and other refractory materials can be used with oxidizing agents and restarts can be made because the material is heated sufficiently to not only maintain decomposition of a liquid monopropellant by a hypergolic or spontaneous exothermic reaction, but this heat can be maintained for a time to allow for restarts. However, hot spots are formed and both the starts and restarts are not uniform initially. Also, the material used is large and crumbles easily, which makes construction options limited and necessarily large, but these materials are inexpensive.
These same materials can be used to make a true catalytic bed for a gas generator by saturating them with a molybdenum resinate and a turpentine solution and decomposing the solution to leave a residue coating on the inert porous material. A manganese carbonyl compound or other substances could be used in place of the molybdenum. But, the construction options are still limited and the generators are large.
The present invention provides a gas generator having a porous catalytic plate as the degeneration bed. The physical properties of the metal plate allow for greater design flexibility.